Developer Hiring Blog

You have an opening on your engineering team, and you know someone who’d be a great fit—except you’ve rejected that person in the past. There’s no chance that developer will ever engage with you again, right? Not always.

Why is that the case? Think back to the last few tech candidates that you’ve declined. Some of them probably didn’t have the skills that your team was looking for, but others might have been talented programmers that you just didn’t have a role for at the time. If you maintain the relationships with the latter, the door is far from shut on a reunion down the road.

That begs the question: How do you maintain those relationships, and what should you do when you want to re-engage with someone that you’ve rejected in the past? Here are a few tips to keep in mind.

Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, is the fastest-growing tech hub in the UK. Last week, The Next Web commented on some of the surprising changes we see in the UK software development landscape and the reasons they think this city has made a name for itself. Data from our latest report on tech trends, reveals that the developer population in Edinburgh has grown by a staggering 8% in the second half of the year. This raises the total developer population to almost 20,000, accounting for 7% of the total labour force. That’s not to say that other cities aren’t popular locations for coders. In fact, London remains the UK’s biggest developer population with over 300,000 developers. Dublin is another booming tech hub where one-tenth of the labour force consists of developers.

Why is it that Edinburgh's developer population has grown this rapidly in 2017?

In 2017, 52% of employees worked remotely at least once a week. Engineers, product managers and marketers alike are adapting to a flexible work style to improve their work-life balance and increase focused work time. (Wouldn’t you want to get rid of that nasty commute?)

We atOwl Labsare 40% remote ourselves, and we love to experiment with new ways to support our own distributed team. However, some companies are unsure how to adapt.

If there’s one key point you take away, let it be this. Data shows that remote and flexible work is becoming a standard practice. With that, we need to stop over optimizing for the in-office employee and instead take a balanced approach.

A technical resume only scratches the surface of a developer’s career story. It might show you a few bullet points about previous jobs and programming competencies, but there are so many other details that you need to know before hiring a programmer.

Fortunately, lots of developers aren’t shy about sharing their work on GitHub. A lot of what you’ll find on a typical GitHub profile might not make sense to you if you’ve never written a line of code. But there are a few ways that tech recruiters can (and should) use GitHub to evaluate developers. Here are a few that you can try as soon as you’re done reading this post.

Amazon has a proposal: it plans to create a second headquarters—complete with 50,000 high-paying jobs and $5 billion in US investment—somewhere in North America. But instead of going on the hunt, Amazon has initiated the economic development equivalent of the well-known dating game, The Bachelor, and is asking cities across the continent to bid for its affection.

Canadian cities from Vancouver to Halifax have risen to the occasion to prove that they have the quality of life, transportation, infrastructure, and most importantly the talent necessary to woo the global tech giant.

However, in building their cases, these Canadian cities have often relied on traditional labor market information sources that can fail to accurately capture the kinds of skills that tech giants like Amazon are looking for. Specifically, I’m referring to a voracious appetite for experienced and versatile software developers.

While technology companies are comprised of much more than just developers, developers do represent an indispensable component of the tech sector. However, due to the constantly evolving nature of the profession, they are often not accurately captured by national statistics.

To help fill this gap, the Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship at Ryerson University partnered with Stack Overflow, to produce Stacking Up: A Snapshot of Canada’s Developer Talent. This report aims to pull Canadian developers into focus: where they are, what kinds of jobs and industries they work in, which languages they use, and what they earn.

Looking to hire some of Canada's developer talent? Here are a few of the report's main takeaways.

In the past, Europe was seen as a backwater - struggling to compete with tech giants in the United States and Asia. Employers struggled to hire the best talent, as developers left the region in favour of better prospects in Silicon Valley. However, in recent years, the region has emerged as hub for tech innovation: attracting significant investment and talent from around the globe.

Today, Atomico launched their third annual State of European Tech Report at Slush (the tech conference notorious for pyrotechnics, parties and well… lots of slush.) It contains valuable insights into the technology ecosystem in Europe: including regional programming trends and the battle between supply and demand for tech talent in major tech hubs.

If you’re growing an engineering team in Europe, read on for the inside scoop on the trends that are shaping the developer hiring landscape.

Your employer branding strategy can be the difference between hiring the developers you need and losing them to your competition. But acknowledging the importance of your employer brand isn’t enough to land on the positive side of that equation.

Even though developers have been outspoken about what gets their attention, there are a few common mistakes in employer branding content that they still see far too often. We reached out to a few technology professionals to find out which errors they’re tired of seeing. Read on to discover what they had to say.

Raise your hand if you’ve heard this before: Developers want the flexibility to work remotely. If your hand is currently in the air, you’re not alone. But how are you supposed to monitor a programmer’s productivity when you can’t walk over to that person’s desk? Is it even possible to keep them on track to meet deadlines when there are dozens of potential distractions at home?

The truth is that a growing number of professionals feel that they’re more productive when they work remotely. In a recent FlexJobs survey, 66% of respondents said that they get more done when they’re not in the office. With remote working options proving to be less of a luxury perk (not to mention a boost to your team’s output), why else do programmers value the flexibility to do their jobs from home?

We reached out to a few developers to learn more about how they get things done from the comfort of a home office. Here’s what they had to say.

What do you think of when you hear the words “application development?” If you’re like most people, you probably think of the mobile apps that power your smartphone. But even though more people than ever are considering the benefits of ditching their PCs for high-powered mobile solutions, desktops (and desktop applications) are still the best way for most professionals to get their jobs done.

Not surprisingly, desktop applications developers are in high demand. They’re also some of the highest paid programmers in North America. So how can you attract and hire the types of candidates you need? Here are a few things to keep in mind as you search for your next desktop application developer.

When you need to hire developers, it's hard to ignore what other companies can offer. Perks like remote working options, catered lunches, and generous education budgets aren’t nearly as uncommon as they were just a few years ago. When you can’t offer something (or multiple things) that developers have repeatedly asked for, how can you compete for the tech talent you need?

Far too often, tech recruiters apologize for the all of the ways that their jobs fall short. On some level, developers appreciate your openness. But does that help you recruit developers and hit your hiring goals? According to Chris Haseman, a Senior Engineering Manager at Uber, the answer is a resounding no. Let’s talk more about why that should be the case, and how you can create a more compelling recruitment pitch by apologizing less for what you can’t offer developers.